One thing you should never do — listen to heavy metal gods speaking. One of my more unsettling experiences was hearing Deep Purple talk. You just don’t expect a man with hair to his waist, wearing a leather waistcoat and a witch’s hat to express himself like a PhD candidate, do you? It’s just not seemly.
So when the press release came in announcing that Tony Iommi, the guitarist with Black Sabbath, was returning to the digital station Planet Rock with another series of his Black Sunday shows of music’n’top ad hoc reminiscing (7pm), and having missed him before, I was tempted to give it a miss. I couldn’t have lived if the man who wrote the riff to Paranoid had turned out to sound like James Blunt.
Luckily, a life of easeful wealth might have knocked many of the edges off the Iommi persona, but there’s still enough Black Country rocker there to keep him real. Throughout his two-hour show he’d be talking away quite normally and all of a sudden he’d slide into pure Noddy Holder. Disconcerting, but strangely comforting.
Trouble is, he is also as bland as his plank-spanking remains mega. Planet Rock has some impressive stars on its presenters’ roster — Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Rick Wakeman — who can tell a good story as well as play a good slice of classic noise. If Iommi knows any he’s keeping them to himself. Last Sunday, for example, we heard about the time, back in the Seventies (“a great time”, apparently) John “Bonzo” Bonham got paralytically drunk the night before he was due to act as Iommi’s best man. Hilarious. Drank himself to death a few years later. What a guy.
But if Iommi couldn’t tell a decent story about his superstar friends, maybe he could let the light into a few corners of himself. One listener wrote in to inquire whether he was in the hard-rocking habit of keeping spiders and snakes. Well, no. “I do love pets; I have dogs. I once had ten rottweilers at the same time — if they’re trained right they’re a fabulous pet.” Rock’n’roll! Still, give him his due, he played some fabulous stuff. Bad Company, Hendrix, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Led Zepp, Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4, Neil Young . . . Neil Young? Yes — Old Man, without an ounce of apparent irony.
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At the end he said goodbye and promised to be “back next week with more chaos”. Yeah, right.
Planet Rock can be heard on DAB digital radio, Sky channel 0110, ntl 880, telewest 924 and on www.planetrock.com